For those making the switch to Thunderbolt for your PCIe needs.

[Herb Sevush]

[Jeremy Garchow] “What are you doing with your PCIe cards?”

With me it’s still in the contemplation stage, but the sonnet Echo Express III expansion chasis, with 3 slots for Tblt 2 expansion, will be the way I would go, providing all my raid card’s will play nicely with it. My raids cost more than a new MacPro, the main one hums along at around 850/mbs at 80% capacity, and the idea of tossing them out is a non starter.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Herb Sevush] ” My raids cost more than a new MacPro,”

There’s certainly no way we are tossing the raid, just trying to figure out which PCIe cards to keep.

The Sonnet junction looks very cool. I like that you can put more hard drives in there if needed.

Doe anyone know if you can boot from Thunderbolt attached drives?

Jeremy

[Chris Kenny]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I am thinking that we will repurchase video out and drive connection devices, but stick our data controllers (fibre/etc) in a TB2 enclosure as I haven’t seen any news on ATTO TB2 fibre connectors.

Just out of curiosity, what are you doing when switching to Thunderbolt?”

We’ve got two Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures, one two slot model (The Thunderbolt 2 upgradable Echo Express SE II) with an SAS RAID controller + an SAS HBA that’s more tape-drive friendly, the other with just an SAS RAID controller. This lets us buy cheaper SAS RAID gear instead of Thunderbolt gear, and move it not only between machines with Thunderbolt, but also to older non-Thunderbolt machines (that have SAS RAID controllers in PCIe slots). ATTO has Thunderbolt to SAS gear now, but we already had non-ATTO RAID controllers, and there’s more flexibility with a non-integrated solution. ATTO’s external Thunderbolt gear is also bulkier than we’d like and doesn’t have Thunderbolt 2 or an upgrade path, as far as they’ve announced.

If someone shipped a Thunderbolt 2 SAS RAID controller that was as compact as, say, Promise’s SANLink device, then I think at this point we’d probably buy a couple of those and ditch the PCIe enclosures. Alternatively if Thunderbolt RAID enclosures continue to get cheaper we might ditch the whole SAS route altogether for RAID (still need it for talking to tape drives). We’ve also recently been evaluating 10GbE/iSCSI and Fibre Channel shared storage solutions that could make direct-attach storage mostly irrelevant around here.

As far as video I/O, we just picked up an UltraStudio 4K (new Thunderbolt 2 version) in preparation for the new Mac Pro moving into our DI theater. We’ve had an UltraStudio Mini kicking around for about a year that we use with laptops, etc. and that has been really convenient. The DeckLink card we have been using for video output in our theater will be transferred to another older machine that will be used for ScopeBox.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Michael Garber]

Spotty playback in FCP 7. Dropped frames, mostly. Prores HQ support, but technically no standard ProRes support. No ability to convert 23.98 to 29.97 inside the box – not fault of the express, but I’ve been spoiled by AJA hardware and assumed it came standard on vid-out devices. Lately I’ve been getting black frame flashes inside FCP X. Also, not as quick to update during shuttling in the timeline as with the Kona 3 and 3G I had fooled around with before I got it. Blackmagic support not as responsive as AJA.

For standard playback, it’s been ok and yeah it works in all the apps. Just the extras stuff I mentioned and the issues that are bringin’ me down. Ultimately, I’m just picky.

Michael Garber
5th Wall – a post production company
Blog: GARBERSHOP
My Moviola Webinar on Cutting News in FCP X

[Daniel Frome]

David, I had been meaning to ask you…

Put together a top of the line ProMax system and bench it. I’d like to see a mac pro + pegasus RAID price/performance vs a ProMax w/ built in RAID price/performance.

Especially on a 24 core ProMax system… I can dream.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Thanks so much, everyone.

Jeremy